Hey guys! First time posting here. I tuned my toms recently to about finger tight on all of them. They are DW gunmetal grey toms with DW clear batter and redo heads. They have Evans e-rings on them as well, although the rings don’t perfectly fit the mid and floor toms. They sound kinda twangy and flat to me, and I hear these rich, open, buttery sounding toms in music and online and I’m like, what am I doing wrong? Is this just the sound of these toms? Should I get new heads? Below is a video demonstrating the sound. The video was recorded with AirPods in so the AirPods mic doesn’t sound the greatest but it was recorded in a room with sound panels so it should sound fine.
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Thanks for any help you can give!
Oh boy, where do I begin? First of all, you’re right to assume your toms sound like crap—because they do. Finger tight is WAY too loose for any drum, so you can consider your toms not at all tuned.
To get them tuned up and sounding good, first you need to get each head in tune with itself. In other words, make sure the tension at each lug is even all the way around. The easiest way to do that is to place the drum on a carpeted floor and tap about 1-2" from each lug. The carpeting completely mutes whichever head is facing down, so you'll only hear the head you're tapping. Furthermore, you'll only hear the higher harmonics, which makes it easier to determine relative pitch between lugs. Keep adjusting little by little until they're all at the same pitch, then do that for each head.
Once your heads are in tune with themselves, it’s easy to tune them up or down by adjusting each tension rod in equally small increments all the way around in a star pattern. Most of the time, I'll tune the top heads at a medium to medium-low tension, then tune the bottom heads about a third higher. For example, if your top head is overall tuned to a C, then a third higher will be three notes up the scale (starting with C), so in this case the bottom head would be an E. That produces a bright, articulate sound. The exact ratio between heads will vary (for example, your floor tom may only have the bottom head 1 note above the top head instead of a third higher). You'll have to experiment for each drum.
It’s definitely a learning process, but hopefully these steps will help. Or you can just buy a TuneBot and let that tell you how to tune, but I think it’s better to know how to do it yourself. Either way, good luck!
